“What the hell happened out there?” Feuerstein raged.
Harris looked at the men and women looking at him. They were all flushed and most were shaking badly. He shook his head and looked away, placing the phone back to his ear.
“Before I tell you what you can do with your special, Feuerstein, I’ll say this, and I think I speak for the rest of my crew: I quit. Now you have a happy Halloween, you son of a bitch!”
John looked down into the hole that was the subbasement. Jenny knew what he was going to do and reached out with a shaking hand to stop him. He smiled and touched her arm.
“There’s nothing down there that can hurt us. We have to look for Kelly and Sanborn. They could be hurt down there.”
Jenny whimpered but let go of John’s arm. Leonard came over when Lonetree looked his way and placed his arm around Jennifer. He nodded that John should go.
Lonetree shined the light around the darkness below and saw that he could shimmy his way down the broken staircase where the stove hadn’t demolished it.
After three minutes and almost falling to his death five times, Lonetree hit the dirt floor of the subbasement. He shined the small penlight around and saw the stove which he had used to free the trapped entities. Then he froze as he saw some of the barren earth move to his left. A hand pushed its way through the dirt. He grasped it and pulled. Kelly Delaphoy came free of the soil with a gasp, trying desperately to breathe. John left her laying on the hard packed floor as he searched for Jason Sanborn. It didn’t take long — he heard the associate producer moan as he too broke free of the spot where the black mass had buried him alive.
Kelly was spitting dirt out of her mouth and crying. John assisted Sanborn to the wall and helped him to sit.
John looked around as they recovered from their premature burial, and he noticed the designs on the wall. Pentangles and other demonic designs were etched into the hard earth walls beneath Summer Place.
“God almighty.”
Epilogue
“The Doors are now firmly shut, and the floors are no longer clean and free of dust”
Kelly paid for the meeting room at the Waldorf Astoria with the severance pay she had been issued the week before. At the table were nine people, four of whom were now happily unemployed.
George Cordero, Leonard Sickles, Harris Dalton, Kelly Delaphoy, Jennifer Tilden, Jason Sanborn, Damian Jackson and Julie Reilly spoke in hushed voices, catching up on what they’d each been doing over the two months since Halloween night at Summer Place.
Wallace Lindemann had committed himself to a hospital in Westchester County, New York for treatment of alcoholism and a possible schizophrenic condition brought on by his stay in his only investment left in the world. As for Lionel Peterson, he had moved to become head of Fox News, where, as Julie Reilly put it, absolutely no one would ever take him seriously again. Julie, Kelly and Jason had been released from their contracts by the network — the company was “moving in another direction” with reality television. Julie had not been offered the anchor chair for the nightly news, and that had forced her out along with Hunters of the Paranormal. Damian Jackson had been forced to accept early retirement from the Pennsylvania State Police, on the grounds that he had been overworked to the point that his reports no longer made sense. As for the network, it was being sued by every one of the sponsors that had bought into the primetime Halloween special — a debacle that had forced the aging CEO to step down (with a full golden parachute, of course).
The door opened and everyone turned to see Gabriel Kennedy being wheeled into the meeting room with John Lonetree pushing him along. Gabriel was parked at the head of the table, and then John took a seat next to Jennifer. She leaned over and kissed him. Jenny was resplendent in a bright yellow dress, and her weight had come back strong. Her life had totally turned around. She could even listen to “oldies but goodies” stations again without feeling bad over Bobby Lee McKinnon and his sacrifice for her. She smiled at Lonetree and leaned back in her chair.
Gabriel took in all of the faces around the table. He tossed a large folder onto the table, and once again looked from face to face.
“John, would you like to start? Then I’ll give you the police findings.”
Lonetree squeezed Jenny’s hand and then slowly stood.
“The Dream Walk is where the story starts and ends. When I was under, I was able to see the very beginning — the creation of Elena Lindemann, if you will. In all actuality, Elena Vilnikov was born Vasily Gregory Vilnikov in 1881—the only son of Russian parents who were distant relatives of the Russian royal family, the Romanovs. Vasily had twin sisters, who were four years younger. The father doted on the girls, to Vasily’s severe detriment. The boy was ignored, ridiculed, when all he wanted in life was to be loved. As you may remember from Leonard’s photographs, there were no girls that matched Elena’s age in the family, only the boy and the two younger sisters. Vasily had a warped impression of just what his father hated about him. That was the spark, we think, that ignited Vasily’s plan to become what he knew his father loved: a girl.”
John paused for a drink of water and looked toward Gabriel, who nodded his encouragement.
“During the Dream Walk, I witnessed Vasily’s turning point. He burned his father and his sisters to death in their house. He escaped with his mother, who we may assume covered up for him until the day she died, leaving the boy alone in the world and free to become anyone he wanted. We can only assume he had launched into a homosexual affair with F.E. Lindemann at some point. At what point Frederic was talked into actually marrying and allowing his lover to become a full time woman…that’s only conjecture.”
“We do have proof — the bodysuits in the sewing room, sewn by Vasily’s meticulous hands,” Gabriel reminded everyone.
“As for the children of Elena and F.E. Lindemann,” John continued. “Now, Vasily obviously couldn’t have children. So they created changelings. Children were stolen from their mothers at birth — or were cut directly from their mothers’ wombs. There were no end of immigrant mothers, pregnant and seeking help. The Lindemanns were handily positioned, taking in those pregnant immigrants. Alone in a new world, they would never be missed. To outward appearances, it looked generous, assisting those lonely women by providing them work and lodging.”
“You mean to say that none of the Lindemanns’ eight children were their own?” Damian interjected. “That they were—?”
“Changelings,” John said.
“The sons of bitches.”
“Yes,” John agreed. “One of those young women was the sister of the German opera star, Gwyneth Gerhardt. Gwyneth came looking for the girl after she got pregnant and ran off to America. She tracked her to Summer Place and suspected something wasn’t right. I witnessed her death when she got too close to the truth.”
“The trapped spirits in the subbasement?” Julie Reilly asked.
“Yes. They were the mothers of the changelings. They were brought to Summer Place and buried in the subbasement, along with twenty-two other women whose births weren’t successful.”
“My God,” Jennifer breathed.
“But the hauntings supposedly started long before the death of Vasily — er, uh, Elena,” Kelly countered.
“That is more speculation,” Gabriel said as John took his seat. “I finally had a talk with the silent movie star’s companion, a lesbian who had a long-standing affair with her. She finally admitted that Vidora Samuels told her she had been raped by a man. Now, we can speculate that it may have been F.E. Lindemann who had committed that crime, or it could have been Vasily. The actress never could identify her attacker, so she just said there was no one there — that was how the haunted house stories began. We can presume the same story goes for the gossip columnist. But since her assault was attempted in broad daylight, she may have seen her attacker.”